


In Search of Spring

by ConsultingFangirl (DestinyWolfe)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Hawaii Five-0 (2010), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Marvel Cinematic Universe Fusion, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Alternate season 8, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, But everything up until then does, Captain America AU, Chin is the Falcon, Danny is the Winter Soldier, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Kono is the Black Widow, Like so much angst I'm warning y'all right now, M/M, Mutual Pining, Season 8 never happens, Soulmates, Steve and Danny are Soulmates, Steve is Captain America, Super Soldier Serum, Temporary Character Death, True Love, marvel AU, season 8 AU, will add more tags later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-02-27 18:11:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13253817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestinyWolfe/pseuds/ConsultingFangirl
Summary: In May of 2017, Steve is told that the only way to reverse the effects of the radiation poisoning is to risk being injected with a brand-new, top-secret serum. What he's not told is that the serum comes at a price: in exchange for the cure, Steve must use his super-human abilities to aid the U.S. government in its war on a terrorist group known as HYDRA.Having no other choice but to leave his island and ohana, Steve agrees. Refusing to be left behind, Danny joins him. Together they travel around the world fighting criminals and taking down terrorists, until a particularly important and dangerous mission goes bad, and Danny is apparently killed in action. After that, Steve wages an all-out personal war on HYDRA, until he too is seemingly killed while piloting an aircraft full of bombs over the Baltic sea.Four years later, Steve's frozen body is found. When he is miraculously returned to life, he finds out that the world he's woken up to is nothing like the one he left behind.  (Captain America/Marvel AU)





	1. The Ghost Box

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, y'all! Looks like my finicky muse has decided to go ahead and write this fic LONG before I have it properly planned out. So if I don't update for a long time, that's probably because I'm trying to hammer out the finer details of the plot and story arcs and how everything fits together. R.I.P. me. 
> 
> Anyway, hope this chapter isn't as much of a rambling mess as it seemed to be when I was writing it (my late-night writing is always iffy at best), and I'll try to get the next chapter up ASAP! (Which, fair warning, could be a while.) Also, just know that if you leave me a comment or kudos, I love you a whole lot, thanks! <3

****

**Chapter One: The Ghost Box**

Under the floorboards in his father’s living room is a box of broken things. Faded photos, battle-worn and splotched with dark stains. Sand-dollars, cracked and chipped like teeth on an old skull. Shards of a broken vase. A Christmas card that tore in half when the envelope was opened roughly, some of the words obscured by jagged edges. A bullet, and a skipping stone: the perfect one, gray and worn and the size of a man’s palm. When he picks it up and holds it, it’s cold. He rubs it between his hands until it heats up. In the hot, muggy Hawaiian afternoon, his palms sweat. The stone darkens. He closes his eyes, and presses it to his lips. He breathes in, out, in, out, in. His breath condenses on the damp rock, a silver sheen, and fades.

It’s been four years, they told him when he woke up. Four years.

He puts the stone down. His hands shake; he knocks over the bullet, and nearly cuts himself on the broken vase. He closes the box’s lid, and sets the box back in the space beneath the floorboards.

All that time, where did it go? For him, it’s endless and unknowable. Maybe it’ll always be. The years he lost (years measured in memories, not age—he’s the same now as he was five years ago, six, seven, ten…) are shadows trapped in ice. Even if, somehow, he could dig up enough information to understand what he’s missed, the reality of those years will never be his. Time passed, and it passed him by.

Methodically, he puts the floorboards back one by one. By the time the last one is in place, his hands are steady. The ghosts of his past are trapped in that box, tethered there: fireflies in a jar.

Pressing his palms to his eyes, he forces the memories back, back, back. Things are coming back in pieces now, as the doctors told him they would. _All normal, all okay. Perfectly natural for a man who’s been through what you’ve been through._

And honestly, how can they know? How can they possibly know? No one’s ever been through what he’s been through. He’s the first of his kind, and the last. There are extremes he’s reached, places he’s been that no one else has ever seen, or should see.

Steve stands up. He waits for the rush of blood to his head, but it doesn’t come. This body, _his_ body, doesn’t make mistakes anymore. All the imperfections have been ironed out. The chemicals they put in him made damn sure of that.

He walks out to the little strip of beach between the grass and the endless blue. The chairs are still there, the white paint peeling in places, stripped down to the wood. That doesn’t matter; the view is the same. He sits for a long moment, and then stands, restless. The wind picks up, and the palms shake. The leaves shudder, rattling like old dry bones. 

Steve puts his hands in his pockets. His fingers brush something solid and smooth; startled, he pulls out the gray skipping stone. He had thought he’d put it back, but no, he hadn’t, had he? He’d set it in the box, yes, but picked it up again before putting the rest away.

For a long moment, Steve stands on the beach with the stone in his hand. He holds it neatly between his thumb and forefinger, balanced, ready. He watches the waves roll over the sand. A million shards of rock crushed over a million years by the relentless ocean. He considers hurling the stone as hard and as far as he can, just to see if his hands remember how. His memories are fuzzy, unsure. Will his hands remember, even if his mind doesn’t? He decides he can’t risk it, and slips the stone back into his pocket. He’ll save it, then. Just a little longer.

He casts his gaze like a net out to the horizon, where the sun is setting. It’s been a long day, and the first in a very long time.

He should get back to the hospital, he realizes. If it gets dark, Kono will worry. Chin will worry. Grover will worry. The nurses and doctors and scientists and government officials will worry. Pressing his hands to his eyes again, he exhales everything. His lungs fold up and his heart beats harder in response. It’s a fight, always a fight. Every single moment, strung up in a web so thick and twisted he wonders if the ones who built it could unravel it now.

He makes his way back into the house. He doesn’t look back at the ocean. If he does, he’ll be lost. He’ll walk out past the sand and the foam and the breakers, and then, like every untethered thing, the water will own him. Castaway, a rudderless ship married to the stormy seas.


	2. Missing Pieces

****

**Chapter Two: Missing Pieces**

The day Danny died, the sky was choked with clouds. Snow spun, tiny dancing acrobats whirling in an endless dance. Everything was frozen; Danny had spent the morning breaking down their tent with half-frozen hands, dropping his gloves and cursing. Steve remembers this like he remembers his mothers smile, or his sister’s laugh. He remembers a feeling in his chest, a hollowness that refused to abate, behind his ribs on the left side. At first, he’d thought it was nerves. But that couldn’t be it. This was just another mission—a dangerous one, sure, but _just another mission_ —and he was never nervous, anyway. 

They set out before sunrise. The last gleam of moonlight filtered through rare gaps in the clouds and caught on the jagged white peaks of an endless mountain range. They climbed down from the flat plain where they’d made their camp the night before, locating a rocky crag where they sat crouched against the fury of the rising storm, waiting for their quarry to arrive. 

The high, sheer mountains sheltered a square mile of covered concrete in the gorge below; the terrorists using the secluded place to store illegal weapons and dangerous raw materials must’ve figured that no one in their right minds would ever risk the fifteen-mile hike and seven-thousand-foot vertical ascension just for the (admittedly stunning) view. Unfortunately for them, despite the discreteness of their hiding place, the terrorists’ associates hadn’t been as hard to find. Or to break.

The plane glided into sight just as the sun broke through the clouds overhead. The morning dawned, bright and violent, over jagged peaks. Steve stood up, shielding his eyes against the sun and snow. He jerked his head at the little aircraft spinning toward the airbase below. “That’s it.”

Danny nodded. “Yeah, I see it.” His eyes were narrowed as he tracked the descending craft. “Looks like the one that guy described to you back in Arsuk. No markings or identification tags, except the red stripes on the tail. Gotta be HYDRA, right?”

Steve nodded. “Guess that guy was telling the truth.”

Danny gave him a _look._ “People tend to do that when you threaten to kill them in creatively horrible ways if they _don’t_ , Steven.”

Steve half-smiled. Danny saw, and huffed. “Please, do me a favor and don’t look so satisfied. You scared a guy half to death.”

“For a good cause, Danny. Besides, he was a terrorist. Or worked for terrorists, at least.”

“Same thing.” Danny lifted his gloved hands to his mouth, sheltering his partially-exposed face from the biting wind. “I see your point.”

Steve hoisted his mission pack higher on his shoulders. He reached down and ran his fingers over the hilt of his knife, then buckled and unbuckled the straps holding his gun in its holster. “You ready?”

“No,” Danny said.

Steve raised his eyebrows. He put a hand on Danny’s shoulder, shaking his partner slightly. “Hey, c’mon, Danno. We’ve done this a hundred times before. Well, maybe not this _exactly_ , but after all the other shit we’ve done, this’ll be a piece of cake.”

Danny sighed. “Says you, this’ll be a piece of cake. What if there’re more of them than we thought, huh? What if they know we’re coming?”

“They don’t know we’re coming, Danny. How could they?” Steve offered a reassuring smile. He let his hand fall from Danny’s shoulder, and finished messing with his gear. “C’mon. Let’s get down before they get too comfortable.”

. . . . . .

Steve stands outside of the hospital in the last light of evening. Overhead, stars crowd a sky still tinged with pink and orange. He wants to go in, but he’s not quite ready to face his friends. His family. Let alone the scientists and government officials who want to watch him, to study him, to take his blood and vitals and a thousand other readings until he feels like a specimen, already dead, pinned to a cork board.

No, he’s not ready. Not yet. So he waits, hesitates, just a few more minutes, and watches people come and go. A young man with casts on both his arms walks out accompanied by a woman who looks like his sister, his head hung and his hair disheveled as she lectures him firmly about taking unnecessary risks. Steve half-smiles, even as his heart twists. Moments later, a young woman with a new baby swaddled in her arms emerges into the night air. Her eyes sparkle with happy tears and her lips part in the biggest smile Steve’s ever seen. There’s a man with his head wrapped in bandages who otherwise looks fine; he gives Steve a thin smile as he walks past. These people were broken, or in pain, scared and vulnerable, and they trusted this place to fix them. He sees it in their faces. They were broken, and now they’re healing. Not fixed, not yet, but they’re on their way.

Steve doesn’t trust this place to fix him. Not because he doesn’t trust the doctors and nurses, or their skill. It’s not that. But his broken pieces can’t be glued back together, or sanitized and wrapped in gauze. The part of him that’s missing can’t be found here. Not in this hospital, not in this city, not in this time. He’s half a person, just half. How are they supposed to glue him back together when half his pieces are missing? He’s a love letter torn in two, meaning lost to time. He remembers the feelings, though, even if the words are lost. The memories are sharp fragments slicing up his mind. He can’t escape them. Even when he can’t remember, they’re there. The serum fixes his body, keeps him sober, keeps him _here._ But it can’t fix his mind. It can’t fix his heart, not when the part of him that made him whole is far away, in another country, another time. Buried in a snowy grave. 

Steve watches a woman emerge, her face hidden behind a handkerchief, sobbing softly. There wasn’t a body to bury, Steve thinks. He never got closure. Just an empty grave filled with memories like restless ghosts.

He feels a hand on his shoulder, and turns, startled and ready to fight. 

It’s Kono. She smiles soft and sad, and squeezes his arm. “It’s me, Steve,” she says. “It’s just me.” It’s like she’s talking to a wild animal, voice low and gentle. She tries not to let on how much she’s hurting. But Steve can see it. He knows her too well. He knows all of them too well not to see how much it hurts, how much _he’s_ hurting them. Just by existing. Just by being here. It’s breaking his family’s hearts, and he can’t fucking stand it.

That’s why he went back to his father’s house. To his house. He thought maybe, maybe, if he could be alone, he would be able to sort some things out. Maybe, if his head was clearer and his eyes brighter, if he _remembered_ , he wouldn’t hurt them so much anymore.

Remembering, it turns out, is more of a transfer than a cure. The more Steve remembers, the more it hurts. Hearing what happened to him is like losing something in reverse. He knew he’d lost something right away. According to his doctors, he woke up screaming Danny’s name. But then, when they’d crowded round, asking _what year is it?_ and _what’s your name?_ and _where are you right now, do you know_?, his mind had gone blank. A white-board wiped clean. The longing, the ache, the fury, it was still there. But he had no idea why he was hurting, or what had once fit behind his ribs in that empty, yawning place where his heart should be.

Kono shakes his shoulder. Steve blinks, and jerks his head to clear it. He smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes, and he knows that she can see it. She reads him just as well as he reads her. 

“Did Dr. West send you to babysit me?” he asks. He tries for a playful tone, and falls five miles short.

Kono sighs. She squeezes his shoulder, then lets him go. She starts back toward the hospital entrance. “They need to run some tests,” she says. He follows her, and they walk side-by-side. Their shoulders bump as they walk through the automatic double doors. They walk past the receptionist and down the hall toward the patient recovery ward. “The doctors agree that you’re showing a lot of improvements,” Kono says, “but they want to keep you in a couple more days.”

“Make sure if I have a breakdown, I do it somewhere where I won’t hurt anyone,” Steve guesses. “Or myself.”

Kono frowns. She shrugs. Her hair, shorter than he remembers it being, falls across her face and hides her eyes. She pushes it back, and sighs again. “Maybe. Honestly, Steve, I think they’re worried about you. I think we all are.”

He opens his mouth to reassure her, but the words stick in his throat. He can’t lie. He doesn’t want her to worry, but he can’t lie.

They reach his room, and Kono opens the door. She steps aside, and he walks in, crossing to the little white bed with its white sheets and white pillow. Everything is sterile and clean. Like his mind, wiped clean by ice and time. He sits down on the bed, tilts his head back, and crosses his arms over his chest. He gives Kono another, more convincing, smile. “Glad you came to get me,” he says. “It might’ve been a while, if you hadn’t.”

She returns the smile. “I wish I could stay. But—”

“You’ve got Adam and the kids,” Steve finishes for her. She nods. He remembers that, at least. Everything he’s learned since waking up has stuck, thank God. “You should go. If you get worried about me, you know where I’ll be.”

She tilts her head, leaning on the doorframe. “Do I?” she says. It’s just quiet enough that he’s not sure he’s supposed to hear it. Like everything else, the serum has sharpened his hearing. The scientists told him he’d be able to hear a bird’s heartbeat ten feet away, and it was hardly an exaggeration. 

“See you tomorrow,” Steve says, when Kono continues to hesitate in the doorway. She opens her mouth, eyebrows contracting and expression hardening, but he cuts her off with a sharp shake of his head. “Listen, I’ll be fine for sixteen hours, all right? Your family needs you, Kono. Go home.”

Kono nods. She turns as if to leave, then turns back at the last moment. There’s something utterly unreadable in her dark eyes. “What happened, Steve?” Her voice is quiet. It’s the same tone she used back in the parking lot, like she’s trying not to scare him. Like he’s some wild, unpredictable beast in a tiny cage, and she’s putting her fingers through the bars. “With Danny. What happened to him out there?”

It strikes Steve then that he’s the only living person who really knows what happened that day. They all read his report, attended the funeral. But they don’t _know._

Kono must see the raw pain welling in his eyes, because she backs off. “It’s okay; you don’t have to tell me now. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve asked. It’s been a long day. You should sleep. I’m sorry.”

Steve shakes his head. “Don’t apologize, Kono. It’s okay. You cared about him too; you deserve to know what happened. But I—” His voice fails, and he swallows hard. He can’t look at her, but in the blank, sterile room, where else _can_ he look? 

“Not right now,” Kono says. “I get it.” Her voice is firm now, hard. She’s taking control, and he’s so thankful that he could cry. He’s so tired of making decisions. Of the guilt, the blame, the fear and regret. “Chin, Lou, and I’ll come back tomorrow. If you feel like talking then, we’ll listen. If you don’t, then you don’t have to.”

“Mahalo,” Steve says, his chest tight with emotion. “I mean it, Kono.”

“We’re ohana, Steve,” she says, and smiles in that special way she has. Kind and beautiful and just a tiny bit sad. “We all love you so much. I hope you know that none of us will ever make you do anything you don’t want to. From now on, no one will ever make you do anything you don’t want to ever again. It’s that simple.” 

_And it’s that hard,_ she doesn’t say. But the words are there, and they linger in his mind even after she’s gone.

Steve lies back on his bed. He doesn’t bother to turn off the lights. There’s no point; the doctors and scientists will be arriving any minute now, and it’s pointless to try and sleep in the meantime. So instead, he stares up at the steady, too-bright ceiling light and remembers.

It hurts, but he has to. Danny’s grave is empty, and the report is incomplete. Now, Steve is the only one who knows how Danny’s story ends. How _their_ story ends.

_I should’ve been faster. I should’ve reached him._

Steve closes his eyes, and remembers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally got a second chapter written! Just want to say thank you SO MUCH to everyone who has commented, favorited, or left kudos on this story so far. Y'all keep me inspired, and I appreciate your kind words and feedback so very much! Hope you enjoy this chapter. <3


End file.
